Friday, October 26, 2018

The Final Solution: Armageddon

Bombing of Nagasaki (photo: Charles Levy from B-29)

There have been moments when civilization is a hair’s breath from Armageddon. On September 26, l983 Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces judged that the signal of an incipient United States attack was false. It had been a particularly tense period due to the shooting down a Korean Airlines plane. But how many other close calls have gone unreported? In Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick created a satire that was hauntingly realistic, replete with a Wernher von Braun doppleganger in the form of the film's title character and the mushroom shaped cloud at the movie’s end appearing to the score of “We’ll Meet Again." Russian roulette, not realpolitik, seems to be the best way to describe the pressure pot of international relations. Now bombs are being lobbed by a nameless adversary against avatars of liberalism from former presidents, to a network, an actor and an outspoken congresswoman. A Saudi prince orders the mutilation of a columnist in broad daylight. Santayana said that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Remember that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in a backwater named Sarajevo sparked the beginning of World War I. The fission reaction of the H-bomb is ignited by lesser nuclear device. You don’t need a full-fledged altercation between superpowers to result in mass destruction and now with the stakes, like a Mega Millions jackpot, growing exponentially higher, the sky appears to be the limit.

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.